A conversation with Steve Wasserman at the Mechanics’ Institute
Hi. I’m excited to say that this Thursday, January 23 at 6 pm at San Francisco’s venerable Mechanics’ Institute, I’ll be in conversation with publisher, editor and essayist Steve Wasserman on the occasion of the publication of his book Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even if It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays. Wasserman has spent his illustrious career working in every aspect of the book business. Currently the publisher of Berkeley-based Heyday, he was the former deputy editor of the op-ed page and opinion section of the Los Angeles Times; editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; editorial director of New Republic Books; publisher and editorial director at Hill and Wang at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and editor at several other top publishing houses, as well as a former partner at the literary agency Kneerim and Williams, where he represented authors including Christopher Hitchens (a close friend with whom he dreamed up Hitchens’ best-selling God is Not Great), Linda Ronstadt and Robert Scheer.
Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even if It’s a Lie is a first-rate collection of essays published in various publications over the last 40-some years, and dealing with subjects as diverse as Cuba, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Susan Sontag, the Russian avant-garde, and, naturally, the trials, tribulations and glories of the book business. During his long career Wasserman has met and often became friends with a veritable who’s who of contemporary writers, artists and activists, including Sontag (whom he admits he took as his youthful role model, and to whom he pays homage in one of the book’s finest essays), Gore Vidal, Tom Hayden, Barbra Streisand, the aforementioned Hitchens, and Robert Scheer, and his book is filled with illuminating discussions of their work as well as often-surprising and sometimes hilarious personal anecdotes.
Wasserman and I share a few things. We are almost exactly the same age (he’s one year older than me), we both have spent much of our career as editors, and we both graduated from Berkeley High, which in the late 1960s and 1970s was a heady counter-cultural breeding-ground for iconoclasts, artists, intellectuals and, of course, lefties. (We both attended the same 1969 performance of the Living Theater’s Paradise Now, an epochal evening in which, as Wasserman recounts in his book, the avant-garde theater company’s “transgressive” gestures were overwhelmed by the far greater radicalism of the Berkeley audience, members of whom stripped their clothes off while Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s actors issued scripted complaints that they couldn’t.) In the taxonomy of progressives, I was a liberal Menshevik and Wasserman was a New Left Bolshevik: for example, after graduating Berkeley High he went to Cuba to cut sugar cane as part of one of the famous Venceremos Brigades, driven by a romantic view of the Cuban Revolution I never entirely shared, in part because I was simply never as political as he was. Wasserman remains a passionate defender of the left’s best instincts— the desire to rectify injustice and a refusal to kowtow to governmental or corporate orthodoxy—but he is far too intelligent to cling to intellectual dogmas or unsupported ideological ideals of any kind. His long, fine piece on Cuba, for example, is a lucid, nuanced and poignant portrait of a revolution that failed, in part because of America’s refusal to grant Cuba the same relations it accords to other Communist countries like China and Vietnam (which he calls “petulance raised to the level of policy”) but above all because of what he calls Castro’s “lust for power and…sense of messianic mission.”
It should be a fun and stimulating evening. Hope to see some of you at the Mechanics’ Institute this Thursday at 6 pm!
For information and tickets, click here:
https://www.milibrary.org/events/tell-me-something-tell-me-anything-even-if-its-lie-jan-23-2025